15 ms·

Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft

172 points by evo_9 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago
I've never used AWS, but I keep seeing news about large companies or organizations, such as the recent Pentagon story [1], exposing all of their customers' data in plain-text. Is Amazon making it that easy to screw something like that up, or what is going on here? When you see a few random cases likes, you might think it's just an engineering making a dumb mistake, but this is starting to seem systematic, like there's a UX/UI issue at play here that makes all of these companies that should know better screw-up so easily. Or maybe Amazon just needs to make it hard to screw something like this up. So what's going on? [1] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-exposes-web-monitoring-operation https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-expo...
- bfrydl 9y ago
  Speaking generally, most services offered by AWS are too low level to be blamed for problems besides outages or similar issues. They are computing and storage resources that behave exactly as they are configured to do. For example, S3 buckets are not public by default. The Pentagon is entirely to blame for the data breach. Amazon can't make it any harder to make this mistake, because publicly accessible buckets are an extremely common use case, and it is already an explicit choice.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Amazon doesn’t allow you to inhibit public buckets through AWS org and service control policies unless something has changed recently. Pretty big gap in that feature set.
- res0nat0r 9y ago
  s3 objects are private by default. Someone had to manually change the bucket permissions or upload each object and explicitly state they should be world-readable. This case is more user error than anything. I believe they are also starting to mail customers whos buckets are marked world-readble just to remind them there could be a security problem if they didn't mean to do this.
  - empath75 9y ago
    There are also config rules which will notify you if buckets are public, and automatically encrypt them..
- empath75 9y ago
  It's partially a UX/UI issue (which amazon is belatedly working on -- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/amazon_aws_s3_alert/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/amazon_aws_s3_alert... ). It's also just dumb/lazy users. S3 is one of the oldest aws services, and also one of the clunkiest to use.
dforrestwilson 9y ago
I alternate between being a real fan of Bezos and concern about the company's sprawling and growing power/interests. Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him. On the other hand, at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
- dominotw 9y ago
  >Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no? Not necessarily. 1. They can find efficiencies of scale in the system from operating in such large scale and vertical integration. Then its not bad for the customer. 2.If they have to raise prices when competition is out of business, competition will come back in sooner or later. So maybe its bad for customer in short term.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Interesting that you ascribe all good intentions to Bezos and all ill intentions to Amazon. How do you know that "Amazon's" growing power interests are not Bezos'?
  - corndoge 9y ago
    Nobody knows anything either way which is why speculating about it is a waste of time
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him. More folks doing the obvious (building an online everything-store) and driving it to a monopoly? I'd rather we'd have several big online stores. As for the other ventures Amazon is in, not impressed. I'd rather we'd have more in-company expertise, than a huge IaaS shop (whose price for convenience is central control, loss of privacy, and inflated costs that trickle to the consumers).
- asveikau 9y ago
robotcookies 9y ago
Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No. Is Amazon taking control of small companies for their IP and then using it to sue competitors with frivolous lawsuits? (a la sco). Are they suing customers for using competing products? No, I don't think Amazon is doing these things. That link only really gets into the fact that they have a large market share. That alone does't make them a 90s era Microsoft.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Under your criteria (which I agree with) Facebook and or Google would be a better fit. The problem is that those blog posts have already been written to death.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    That's a funny definition of "the problem". The problem should be what's actually the problem, not what we can write novel blog posts about.
    - zitterbewegung 9y ago
      Well original creative reporting doesn’t have any money in it anymore .
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No Is any thing in an analogy the same as the thing it points to? No. That's the very idea behind an analogy: that it points to something being alike between two entities, not about them being/doing same exact things (which wouldn't need an analogy) or totally unlike things (for which one wouldn't make sense). In this case, what Cringely wants you to think/see is not that Amazon "bundles it browser" or "sues Linux a la Sco", but how it's a huge monopoly, it uses its power as leverage, and it screws the little guys.
whatyoucantsay 9y ago
Much of Microsoft's historical behaviour was objectionable. Amazon, however, has been troubling on a much deeper level from the beginning. Their attitude towards labour has been nothing short of Dickensian. I'm not speaking so much of their habit of writing dystopian employment contracts and turning to legal intimidation when employees leave, though that is also a problem, as I am of their treatment of lower paid staff. Refusing dock workers adequate rest, hydration or cooling is indefensible. However impressive the accomplishments and intellect of Mr. Bezos may be, we can no longer hold any faith he or Amazon will bow to even minimal concerns of human decency. The only levers are the threat of financial and regulatory consequences. The further Amazon's power places them beyond such levers the more dangerous they become. https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/ https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons... > The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees. > On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.” It's also worth adding that Amazon eventually did retrofit their facilities with cooling devices but only after their practices drew international media coverage.
- redwood 9y ago
  The Amazon Camperforce is such an interesting thing to me http://www.amazondelivers.jobs/about/camperforce/ http://www.amazondelivers.jobs/about/camperforce/
- collyw 9y ago
thisisit 9y ago
The article assertion is very big in computing = Microsoft of the 90s. I can be wrong but there have not been any anti-competition steps taken at AWS yet. AWS has been light years ahead when it came to cloud computing and now they are having the first mover advantage and the dominant position. But will it last very long? It is very hard to say, over the years companies which were thought infallible have gone down.
- pacala 9y ago
  Try moving your data outside AWS. Store data, $0.023 / GB / month. Access your data outside of AWS, $0.090 / GB. It's more expensive to transfer data outside of AWS once than to store it on AWS for a quarter. Not entirely sure what you meed by "anti-competitive steps taken by Microsoft in the '90s", but holding customer data hostage is as anti-competitive as it gets.
  - jimmaswell 9y ago
    How is this anti competitive? It reflects that it costs more for Amazon to access data outside its services than inside.
    - jazoom 9y ago
      I think the point is those fees are ridiculous.
      - jimmaswell 9y ago
        I don't really have a reference, but $0.023/GB really isn't striking me as anything.
        pacala 9y ago
        It's 0.09 $/GB, or 11 GB/$. Residential gigabit is available say from Centurylink, for $85/month, or 4TB/$. AWS is about 500 times more expensive.
ctvo 9y ago
tl;dr - Amazon is coming Bad Microsoft... because AWS is a monopoly. And a whole lot of things that don't make sense. It might just be too early in the morning for me. > Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast. Somehow I doubt the gap between virtual machine boot time (and this is mostly applicable only to EC2 vs. Azure Virtual Machines) is worth calling out. It might be due to existing developer buy-in and familiarity with AWS in addition to the continual investment in new services and price matching. Why would I switch to Azure when AWS exceeds its offering and is priced just as competitively? These are complex platforms with real lock-in. Switching from AWS to anything else requires a substantial investment in learning new tools, technologies and best practices. So far AWS has made it so there's never been a compelling reason for most users. > ... This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most sensitive to such slow boot times. On-premise cloud and enterprise customers care about virtual machine boot times that much huh? I'd love an example or some citation. > AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft. Anything at all to backup these sentences? I'm not sure they belong together. How does the CIA moving to AWs connect with AWS being a pain to deal with if you're a big customer? > Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven’t worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it’s your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that’s the only world you know. These two paragraphs are particularly ... cringely. Jeff Bezos in the vest with the muscular arms is imprinting on these young minds that they can treat customers and partners badly. I think. Somehow.
ridruejo 9y ago
There's certainly a risk of AWS becoming a monopoly but too early to tell. Microsoft has a large enterprise user base and increasingly a "good enough" cloud product that combined with Office 365 is very attractive to those enterprises. On the technical side Kubernetes is making it easier to move apps among clouds
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Dowwie 9y ago
Doesn't the author mean to say that Amazon is becoming the old Microsoft?
jaxondu 9y ago
Reading just the post title makes me think for a moment that Amazon is releasing Amazon Linux Home Edition 2018 at its Re:Invent event.
maltalex 9y ago
In 2001, just 16 years ago, Microsoft was almost broken up because Internet Explorer was shipped with Windows. Think about that for a second, I'll wait. Seems like small potatoes today, doesn't it? When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services? What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors? We are allowing these companies to integrate vertically to the point of insanity.
- joering2 9y ago
  > What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And the biggest of all of them -- Google Chrome browser advertised on the Google Search FRONT page with link directly under the search box; a spot seen by billions of people that neither you nor your small business or even a corp with billions in revenue have access to! It still blows my mind they never got in trouble for that.
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    Europe is bringing them to book for this.
    - joering2 9y ago
      Really?? I can't find anything and I don't lack Google ninja search skills. Any links to sources would be appreciated!
      - Nomentatus 9y ago
        It's weird that search so often requires a "secret word" that you likely wouldn't or didn't guess would apply, or would be needed, in order to discard all the irrelevant results. Here, the word seems to be "sue." Rather than "charge," say. Happens to me all the time. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=EU+sue+Google+Android&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=EU+sue+Google+Android&ia=web
- deleted 9y ago
markbnj 9y ago
Isn't Amazon also AWS' largest customer, followed by Netflix? And I don't know much about Azure but I wouldn't doubt Microsoft is their largest customer too. I don't know, this whole piece seems more like Cringely needing something to write about during his convalescence.
tinco 9y ago
Amazon is becoming the new Microsoft. Microsoft is becoming the new Apple. Apple is becoming the new Sony. I don't know what's Sony going to be..
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Sony is becoming the new Yugo (as in cheaply-made Zastava Koral car). And, by the way, your statement chain is right on; nicely done! [I'll disclose that I'm quite biased against Sony. In fact, where possible, I avoid purchasing any Sony product at all...and it all goes back to the Sony rootkit scandal of early 2000s. I don't hold a grudge too often...but in this case, I still don't trust (nor wish to purchase anything from) Sony.]
  - tinco 9y ago
    Same here. Corporate degeneracy like that of Sony is destroying Japan's economy.
Noos 9y ago
I think people like to blame companies for what are actually serious flaws in the models of businesses they run altogether. Even if Amazon was broken up, you'd still see the Chinese fake syndrome because that's more about how peer to peer internet based selling fails to work when gamed, and how cheap foreign manufacturing can be used to clone or game the market. Amazon made it worse mostly by comingling inventory, but there were big problems in the whole "yard sale" Ebay mode of internet business way before that. Or with ebooks, the problem isn;t "Amazon is too big," it was publishers and authors choosing which standard is the least likely to increase piracy and drive sales, and the customers who actually pay for goods choosing the marketplace that best serves them. If not Amazon, it would have been Sony or Kobo, but it couldn't ever be Smashwords once authors found how often works were pirated from that open platform. I think people look for scapegoats rather than look at the hard truths about how the internet as a whole isn't particularly working for many types of business models. A lot of the protections that have evolved around physical businesses simply aren't as easy to have or are even available in a net-connected global economy, and the net tends to try and revive a lot of the nasty unregulated models of work from the past as well. Piecework, and penny auctions for example.
blfr 9y ago
Why is AWS so dominant and, surprisingly to me at least, gaining on the competition? Google Cloud seems quite neat and in the same price range. OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack. Businesses in the Microsoft sphere should buy Azure quite easily. And there are many smaller, specialized providers for various needs. Amazon's lead should be eroding not consolidating. Is it just that they were first and everyone standardised on their tools? Devops people choosing AWS on autopilot because it's what they know works? BTW this has to be the best blog header in the business.
- uiri 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I currently work in Azure. I've formerly worked inside of Google Cloud, and before that, AWS. Google runs its own infrastructure on people food and then gives its customers dog food. Until Google is eating its own dog food, it will be a distant third in the cloud market. Amazon understands this. They eat their own dog food throughout the company. They take running their business on AWS to the extreme. Microsoft is primarily hampered by the legacy of Windows. The modern cloud runs on Linux, not Windows. They're at 40% Linux VMs per recently announced numbers. If Azure succeeds, I think we'll see 80%+ Linux VMs. I think current market share is misleading. The current market is less than 5% of what the total market will be in 5-10 years. What matters now is mind share not market share.
- gist 9y ago
  > Why is AWS so dominant and > OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack Oh I definitely might get fired [1] for going with OVH. [1] https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-Nobody-ever-got-fired-for-choosing-IBM-mean https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-Nobody-ever-got-f...
dfps 9y ago
These two aren't the same. If I want, for any reason, to not use Amazon, I can do that easily (even if I will have to pay more, it is my choice) by typing any other online store or seller into my browser, or going to a local store. For the typical person, they cannot use anything other than Microsoft if they want to use a computer, period. Except Mac, which many can't afford and which is limiting in what programs it can run.
- llccbb 9y ago
  I agree that the current state of Amazon's retail goods is not a monopoly. We will see if that remains true in 10 years. Currently Microsoft does not have a monopoly on computer OS. They have practically no stake in mobile computers (smart phones). Mac has a decent share of desktop/laptop usage. Any claim that MacOS is "limiting in what programs it can run" is a 10 year old argument or so one sided (Windows is also limiting in what programs it can run....). The Microsoft of 20 years ago _did_ have a monopoly on computer OS.
  - dfps 9y ago
    I would say they do. For everything except using a few social media apps, the PC is used (not the mobile). You may be speaking as someone techy. For most people, what I said still holds true.
    - llccbb 9y ago
      Android has surpassed Windows as the largest share of web traffic[0], though maybe that means those social apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc. Stat counter also states that >35% of web browser traffic is mobile not desktop[1]. [0] http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-for-first-time http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-fo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

172 points by evo_9 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

I've never used AWS, but I keep seeing news about large companies or organizations, such as the recent Pentagon story [1], exposing all of their customers' data in plain-text. Is Amazon making it that easy to screw something like that up, or what is going on here? When you see a few random cases likes, you might think it's just an engineering making a dumb mistake, but this is starting to seem systematic, like there's a UX/UI issue at play here that makes all of these companies that should know better screw-up so easily. Or maybe Amazon just needs to make it hard to screw something like this up. So what's going on? [1] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-exposes-web-monitoring-operation https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-expo...

bfrydl 9y ago
Speaking generally, most services offered by AWS are too low level to be blamed for problems besides outages or similar issues. They are computing and storage resources that behave exactly as they are configured to do. For example, S3 buckets are not public by default. The Pentagon is entirely to blame for the data breach. Amazon can't make it any harder to make this mistake, because publicly accessible buckets are an extremely common use case, and it is already an explicit choice.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Amazon doesn’t allow you to inhibit public buckets through AWS org and service control policies unless something has changed recently. Pretty big gap in that feature set.
res0nat0r 9y ago
s3 objects are private by default. Someone had to manually change the bucket permissions or upload each object and explicitly state they should be world-readable. This case is more user error than anything. I believe they are also starting to mail customers whos buckets are marked world-readble just to remind them there could be a security problem if they didn't mean to do this.
- empath75 9y ago
  There are also config rules which will notify you if buckets are public, and automatically encrypt them..
empath75 9y ago
It's partially a UX/UI issue (which amazon is belatedly working on -- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/amazon_aws_s3_alert/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/amazon_aws_s3_alert... ). It's also just dumb/lazy users. S3 is one of the oldest aws services, and also one of the clunkiest to use.

dforrestwilson 9y ago

I alternate between being a real fan of Bezos and concern about the company's sprawling and growing power/interests. Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him. On the other hand, at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?

dominotw 9y ago
>Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no? Not necessarily. 1. They can find efficiencies of scale in the system from operating in such large scale and vertical integration. Then its not bad for the customer. 2.If they have to raise prices when competition is out of business, competition will come back in sooner or later. So maybe its bad for customer in short term.
nerdponx 9y ago
Interesting that you ascribe all good intentions to Bezos and all ill intentions to Amazon. How do you know that "Amazon's" growing power interests are not Bezos'?
- corndoge 9y ago
  Nobody knows anything either way which is why speculating about it is a waste of time
coldtea 9y ago
>Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him. More folks doing the obvious (building an online everything-store) and driving it to a monopoly? I'd rather we'd have several big online stores. As for the other ventures Amazon is in, not impressed. I'd rather we'd have more in-company expertise, than a huge IaaS shop (whose price for convenience is central control, loss of privacy, and inflated costs that trickle to the consumers).
asveikau 9y ago

robotcookies 9y ago

Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No. Is Amazon taking control of small companies for their IP and then using it to sue competitors with frivolous lawsuits? (a la sco). Are they suing customers for using competing products? No, I don't think Amazon is doing these things. That link only really gets into the fact that they have a large market share. That alone does't make them a 90s era Microsoft.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
Under your criteria (which I agree with) Facebook and or Google would be a better fit. The problem is that those blog posts have already been written to death.
- mseebach 9y ago
  That's a funny definition of "the problem". The problem should be what's actually the problem, not what we can write novel blog posts about.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Well original creative reporting doesn’t have any money in it anymore .
coldtea 9y ago
>Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No Is any thing in an analogy the same as the thing it points to? No. That's the very idea behind an analogy: that it points to something being alike between two entities, not about them being/doing same exact things (which wouldn't need an analogy) or totally unlike things (for which one wouldn't make sense). In this case, what Cringely wants you to think/see is not that Amazon "bundles it browser" or "sues Linux a la Sco", but how it's a huge monopoly, it uses its power as leverage, and it screws the little guys.

whatyoucantsay 9y ago

Much of Microsoft's historical behaviour was objectionable. Amazon, however, has been troubling on a much deeper level from the beginning. Their attitude towards labour has been nothing short of Dickensian. I'm not speaking so much of their habit of writing dystopian employment contracts and turning to legal intimidation when employees leave, though that is also a problem, as I am of their treatment of lower paid staff. Refusing dock workers adequate rest, hydration or cooling is indefensible. However impressive the accomplishments and intellect of Mr. Bezos may be, we can no longer hold any faith he or Amazon will bow to even minimal concerns of human decency. The only levers are the threat of financial and regulatory consequences. The further Amazon's power places them beyond such levers the more dangerous they become. https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/ https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons... > The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees. > On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.” It's also worth adding that Amazon eventually did retrofit their facilities with cooling devices but only after their practices drew international media coverage.

redwood 9y ago
The Amazon Camperforce is such an interesting thing to me http://www.amazondelivers.jobs/about/camperforce/ http://www.amazondelivers.jobs/about/camperforce/
collyw 9y ago

thisisit 9y ago

The article assertion is very big in computing = Microsoft of the 90s. I can be wrong but there have not been any anti-competition steps taken at AWS yet. AWS has been light years ahead when it came to cloud computing and now they are having the first mover advantage and the dominant position. But will it last very long? It is very hard to say, over the years companies which were thought infallible have gone down.

pacala 9y ago
Try moving your data outside AWS. Store data, $0.023 / GB / month. Access your data outside of AWS, $0.090 / GB. It's more expensive to transfer data outside of AWS once than to store it on AWS for a quarter. Not entirely sure what you meed by "anti-competitive steps taken by Microsoft in the '90s", but holding customer data hostage is as anti-competitive as it gets.
- jimmaswell 9y ago
  How is this anti competitive? It reflects that it costs more for Amazon to access data outside its services than inside.
  - jazoom 9y ago
    I think the point is those fees are ridiculous.
    - jimmaswell 9y ago
      I don't really have a reference, but $0.023/GB really isn't striking me as anything.
      - pacala 9y ago
        It's 0.09 $/GB, or 11 GB/$. Residential gigabit is available say from Centurylink, for $85/month, or 4TB/$. AWS is about 500 times more expensive.

ctvo 9y ago

tl;dr - Amazon is coming Bad Microsoft... because AWS is a monopoly. And a whole lot of things that don't make sense. It might just be too early in the morning for me. > Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast. Somehow I doubt the gap between virtual machine boot time (and this is mostly applicable only to EC2 vs. Azure Virtual Machines) is worth calling out. It might be due to existing developer buy-in and familiarity with AWS in addition to the continual investment in new services and price matching. Why would I switch to Azure when AWS exceeds its offering and is priced just as competitively? These are complex platforms with real lock-in. Switching from AWS to anything else requires a substantial investment in learning new tools, technologies and best practices. So far AWS has made it so there's never been a compelling reason for most users. > ... This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most sensitive to such slow boot times. On-premise cloud and enterprise customers care about virtual machine boot times that much huh? I'd love an example or some citation. > AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft. Anything at all to backup these sentences? I'm not sure they belong together. How does the CIA moving to AWs connect with AWS being a pain to deal with if you're a big customer? > Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven’t worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it’s your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that’s the only world you know. These two paragraphs are particularly ... cringely. Jeff Bezos in the vest with the muscular arms is imprinting on these young minds that they can treat customers and partners badly. I think. Somehow.

ridruejo 9y ago

There's certainly a risk of AWS becoming a monopoly but too early to tell. Microsoft has a large enterprise user base and increasingly a "good enough" cloud product that combined with Office 365 is very attractive to those enterprises. On the technical side Kubernetes is making it easier to move apps among clouds

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Dowwie 9y ago

Doesn't the author mean to say that Amazon is becoming the old Microsoft?

jaxondu 9y ago

Reading just the post title makes me think for a moment that Amazon is releasing Amazon Linux Home Edition 2018 at its Re:Invent event.

maltalex 9y ago

In 2001, just 16 years ago, Microsoft was almost broken up because Internet Explorer was shipped with Windows. Think about that for a second, I'll wait. Seems like small potatoes today, doesn't it? When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services? What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors? We are allowing these companies to integrate vertically to the point of insanity.

joering2 9y ago
> What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And the biggest of all of them -- Google Chrome browser advertised on the Google Search FRONT page with link directly under the search box; a spot seen by billions of people that neither you nor your small business or even a corp with billions in revenue have access to! It still blows my mind they never got in trouble for that.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  Europe is bringing them to book for this.
  - joering2 9y ago
    Really?? I can't find anything and I don't lack Google ninja search skills. Any links to sources would be appreciated!
    - Nomentatus 9y ago
      It's weird that search so often requires a "secret word" that you likely wouldn't or didn't guess would apply, or would be needed, in order to discard all the irrelevant results. Here, the word seems to be "sue." Rather than "charge," say. Happens to me all the time. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=EU+sue+Google+Android&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=EU+sue+Google+Android&ia=web
deleted 9y ago

markbnj 9y ago

Isn't Amazon also AWS' largest customer, followed by Netflix? And I don't know much about Azure but I wouldn't doubt Microsoft is their largest customer too. I don't know, this whole piece seems more like Cringely needing something to write about during his convalescence.

tinco 9y ago

Amazon is becoming the new Microsoft. Microsoft is becoming the new Apple. Apple is becoming the new Sony. I don't know what's Sony going to be..

mxuribe 9y ago
Sony is becoming the new Yugo (as in cheaply-made Zastava Koral car). And, by the way, your statement chain is right on; nicely done! [I'll disclose that I'm quite biased against Sony. In fact, where possible, I avoid purchasing any Sony product at all...and it all goes back to the Sony rootkit scandal of early 2000s. I don't hold a grudge too often...but in this case, I still don't trust (nor wish to purchase anything from) Sony.]
- tinco 9y ago
  Same here. Corporate degeneracy like that of Sony is destroying Japan's economy.

Noos 9y ago

I think people like to blame companies for what are actually serious flaws in the models of businesses they run altogether. Even if Amazon was broken up, you'd still see the Chinese fake syndrome because that's more about how peer to peer internet based selling fails to work when gamed, and how cheap foreign manufacturing can be used to clone or game the market. Amazon made it worse mostly by comingling inventory, but there were big problems in the whole "yard sale" Ebay mode of internet business way before that. Or with ebooks, the problem isn;t "Amazon is too big," it was publishers and authors choosing which standard is the least likely to increase piracy and drive sales, and the customers who actually pay for goods choosing the marketplace that best serves them. If not Amazon, it would have been Sony or Kobo, but it couldn't ever be Smashwords once authors found how often works were pirated from that open platform. I think people look for scapegoats rather than look at the hard truths about how the internet as a whole isn't particularly working for many types of business models. A lot of the protections that have evolved around physical businesses simply aren't as easy to have or are even available in a net-connected global economy, and the net tends to try and revive a lot of the nasty unregulated models of work from the past as well. Piecework, and penny auctions for example.

blfr 9y ago

Why is AWS so dominant and, surprisingly to me at least, gaining on the competition? Google Cloud seems quite neat and in the same price range. OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack. Businesses in the Microsoft sphere should buy Azure quite easily. And there are many smaller, specialized providers for various needs. Amazon's lead should be eroding not consolidating. Is it just that they were first and everyone standardised on their tools? Devops people choosing AWS on autopilot because it's what they know works? BTW this has to be the best blog header in the business.

uiri 9y ago
Disclaimer: I currently work in Azure. I've formerly worked inside of Google Cloud, and before that, AWS. Google runs its own infrastructure on people food and then gives its customers dog food. Until Google is eating its own dog food, it will be a distant third in the cloud market. Amazon understands this. They eat their own dog food throughout the company. They take running their business on AWS to the extreme. Microsoft is primarily hampered by the legacy of Windows. The modern cloud runs on Linux, not Windows. They're at 40% Linux VMs per recently announced numbers. If Azure succeeds, I think we'll see 80%+ Linux VMs. I think current market share is misleading. The current market is less than 5% of what the total market will be in 5-10 years. What matters now is mind share not market share.
gist 9y ago
> Why is AWS so dominant and > OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack Oh I definitely might get fired [1] for going with OVH. [1] https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-Nobody-ever-got-fired-for-choosing-IBM-mean https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-Nobody-ever-got-f...

dfps 9y ago

These two aren't the same. If I want, for any reason, to not use Amazon, I can do that easily (even if I will have to pay more, it is my choice) by typing any other online store or seller into my browser, or going to a local store. For the typical person, they cannot use anything other than Microsoft if they want to use a computer, period. Except Mac, which many can't afford and which is limiting in what programs it can run.

llccbb 9y ago
I agree that the current state of Amazon's retail goods is not a monopoly. We will see if that remains true in 10 years. Currently Microsoft does not have a monopoly on computer OS. They have practically no stake in mobile computers (smart phones). Mac has a decent share of desktop/laptop usage. Any claim that MacOS is "limiting in what programs it can run" is a 10 year old argument or so one sided (Windows is also limiting in what programs it can run....). The Microsoft of 20 years ago _did_ have a monopoly on computer OS.
- dfps 9y ago
  I would say they do. For everything except using a few social media apps, the PC is used (not the mobile). You may be speaking as someone techy. For most people, what I said still holds true.
  - llccbb 9y ago
    Android has surpassed Windows as the largest share of web traffic[0], though maybe that means those social apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc. Stat counter also states that >35% of web browser traffic is mobile not desktop[1]. [0] http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-for-first-time http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-fo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...